Embodiments generally relate to the creation of integrated circuit electrical models for analysis and optimization of integrated circuit design and fabrication.
Library characterization is a necessary and well-defined step during the design of an integrated circuit. It extracts the electrical behavior and functional model of every logic gate in a cell library, given their transistor level circuitry and manufacturing process models. However, library characterization is also a very compute intensive process, often requiring hundreds of computers running a characterization program in parallel, over duration of many weeks, in order to generate a complete set of library. Recent design methodologies require even more variants in a cell library, in terms of process, supply voltage and temperature variations, resulting in even longer runtime durations and larger compute farms. This ultimately leads to delaying the integrated circuit design schedule.
It is within this context that embodiments of the invention arise.